This image shows the first sign of successful in vitro fertilization. (Oregon Health & Science University)

I got the truth when I was 16: My mother hadn’t gotten pregnant by an ex-boyfriend. I was, rather, the product of a completely intentional transaction. My father was an anonymous sperm donor.

My mom conceived me on her own at a time when it wasn’t in vogue to do so, and she didn’t tell her siblings or parents what she’d done. The revelation hit me deeply. An introverted, introspective teen, I internalized her decision to hide the truth as my own shame — shame I still feel today.

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I know about my dad is that he is a 6ft-tall doctor with brown hair and green eyes. My parents chose him from a list at a sperm bank in Bristol, and from the moment I was old enough to understand, they were open with me that I was born via artificial sperm donor insemination to my biological mum, Miranda.

The donor was chosen to match mum’s partner, Dawn, in terms of her physical characteristics, so on paper I should have been tall and dark, but I turned out to be blond and blue-eyed. My mum likes to joke that they must have mixed up the sperm

The high cost of assisted reproductive treatment in North America is forcing many US citizens to look to other countries for high-quality medical care at a lower cost.

Fertty International. A modern clinic, for new models of the family (PRNewsfoto/Fertty International)

In 2016, nearly 1.4 million Americans travelled outside the U.S. in search of medical treatment, compared to 750,000 in 2008. Currently, medical tourism, or cross border reproductive care as the media have labelled it, is rising by 25% per year.

The primary reasons for these trips, according to a study conducted by the Task Force on Ethics and Law from the ESHRE, and published in the scientific journal Human Reproduction (Shenfield et al. 2010), is the difficulty in accessing certain treatments due to legal restrictions, long waiting lists, and thirdly, the search for high-quality reproductive treatment.

The main countries hosting these medical tourists in Europe are Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Switzerland, Slovenia and Spain. The fact that the latter has the most permissive legislation in terms of assisted reproduction, together with the European regulations on mobilisation of biological samples, and high medical and technical quality make Spain the top destination. It is also the country with the most egg donations.

More than 3,000 women travel abroad for cheap assisted human reproduction treatments every year, a leading fertility doctor has estimated.

Dr John Kennedy, medical director of Virtus Health, the largest provider of fertility services in Ireland, said the figure included those who travelled to get conventional IVF treatments, egg donation and surrogacy services.

He said it was difficult to get exact figures because some women travelled without informing their fertility doctors, but that 3,000 was a reasonable estimate. The average cost of a cycle of IVF in Ireland is between €5,000 and €7,000, but can cost less than €3,000 in some eastern European countries. Dr Kennedy said these countries were always going to be cheaper, but there could be differences in quality of care.

The parents of a sperm donor have won the right to have contact with their four-year-old biological grandson in what is believed to be the first case of its kind.

Three senior judges ruled that encouraging the boy’s relationship with his paternal family would help him understand the “big picture of his birth story”. The boy was born to a gay female couple, one of whom knew the donor, Lord Justice Peter Jackson said. There was no dispute that he was legally their child but, for the first three years of his life, the natural father had regular contact with the boy.

The Supreme Court on Monday let stand an Arizona ruling that said paternity should be applied the same way in same-sex marriages as it is in opposite-sex marriages when it comes to determining parental rights.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday let stand an Arizona ruling that said paternity should be applied the same way in same-sex marriages as it is in opposite-sex marriages when it comes to determining parental rights.

The court’s refusal to hear the case means Suzan McLaughlin still has parental rights over the child that Kimberly McLaughlin conceived through artificial insemination while the two were married.

A 60-year-old woman delivers a healthy baby in Hanoi in mid-February, thanks to an egg donor.

She hit menopause several years ago but did not give up on her dream of motherhood.

A Vietnamese woman has given birth to a healthy child at the age of 60, making her the oldest woman in the country to become a mother.

The woman, named only as Ngan, hit menopause several years ago after struggling for a long time to have a baby. She and her husband eventually decided to resort to IVF, using donated eggs and her husband’s sperm.

The baby was born in mid-February via C-section and weighing 2.6 kilograms, and has been given extra formula milk as Ngan cannot produce enough.

For the third time, a federal judge in Atlanta has tossed out claims against a Georgia sperm bank involving a donor it touted as a highly educated and multitalented but who was really a convicted felon with a history of mental illness.

The order issued Thursday by Northern District Judge Thomas Thrash Jr. closely mirrors two he issued last year, finding that Xytex Cryo International clients who bore children sired by the donor have no basis under Georgia law to sue for “wrongful birth.”

The dramatic growth of the databases is raising ethical challenges for the donor conception community. It has been recognised for some time that donor anonymity can no longer be guaranteed but this hypothetical threat is now very much a reality.

Donor conceived individuals are using genetic genealogy databases to match with genetic relatives and identify their biological parents, and there have been many success stories. There are now also a number of cases where people have accidentally discovered that they were donor conceived after taking a commercial DNA test. Some families who have used the services of a fertility clinic have learnt through DNA testing that the clinic owner substituted his own sperm for that of the father (see BioNews 931).

This photo provided by Matt White shows him with Jacoba Ballard, left, and Julie Harmon in New York before a television interview. The three one-time strangers have also reached out to 21 other men and women, all in their 30s, who’ve been linked through DNA tests as their half-siblings, which they claim is evidence that former fertility doctor Donald Cline is likely thei biological father. (Courtesy Matt White via AP)

ZIONSVILLE, Ind. (AP) — Matt White remembers that day in September 2016 when a mystery began to unravel that would change his life.

It started when White read a news report that Dr. Donald Cline, a retired Indianapolis fertility specialist, faced charges for lying when he denied he’d inseminated unwitting patients with his own sperm decades earlier. He searched out Cline’s address online, recognizing it as the location of his mother’s former doctor. Then he Googled the doctor’s name. When a photo popped up, he was stunned: He looked like Cline.

Tyler and his half sister Heather. This is only the second time they’ve met. (Photo by Robbi Pengelly/Index-Tribune)

Growing up as an only child, Tyler Sievers was comfortable with solitude.

His mothers expected their son to occupy himself – and so Sievers became a creative and resourceful boy. For 18 years he lived happily as a party of one.

And then he sent his DNA to Ancestry.com, and got 20 half-siblings back.

He was conceived in March of 1999, using donated sperm banked at Pacific Reproductive Services in San Francisco. The donor was selected by his mothers from hundreds of options, using data that profiled each man’s broad particulars. Age, height, weight, eye-color. Medical history, family history, hobbies and skills. Sievers’ moms made their choice and his biological mother was inseminated. On Dec. 23 of 1999, Tyler Hammill Sievers was born.

There are more options than ever for same-sex couples looking to expand their families, but it’s not a simple — or affordable — endeavor for many.

Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and his husband, British Olympic diver Tom Daley, announced on Valentine’s Day that they’re expecting their first child. But while there are more options than ever for same-sex couples looking to expand their families, it’s not a simple — or affordable — endeavor for many.

The past year of my life has felt like some combination of an Oprah special and a binge-worthy Netflix series. I was born and raised as a (very proud) only child. My parents divorced when I was young, and although both remarried, neither ever had any other children of their own. My dad was married a total of five times, so I’ve had plenty of step-siblings—but not any blood relations as far as I knew.

Fast-forward to May of 2017, and in one click, my whole identity changed. After sending in DNA samples to learn more about my ancestry, I finally got results— and one click later I opened a Pandora’s box of siblings and went from an only child to a 39-year-old woman who had 17 siblings I didn’t know about.

Kianni Arroyo, who has made contact with 40 other people born to the same sperm donor father as her (Picture: Kianni Arroyo)

A woman whose father was a sperm donor has tracked down 40 siblings born to the same man, and is sharing her encounters with them online.

Kianni Arroyo, from Orlando, Fl, first began the project five years ago, when she was a high school sophomore.

She has since discovered four sets of twins, and siblings as far afield as Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Kianni, 21, is the oldest known sibling born to the donor, with the youngest a baby who is just five months old

Kianni, who works as a waitress, told Metro US: ‘I was raised just by my mom, and she’s always been honest with me about the fact that I was born to a sperm donor.

Lauren decided to skip sex and use sperm from a donor to have her first child and it worked. She is expecting her baby, who will likely be named after a character in Game of Thrones, in June. “People know I’m single and having a kid by myself,” Lauren said in an interview with VICE. “But they don’t necessarily know the virgin part of it.”

Lauren is very comfortable with her “virgin” label and doesn’t seem to want to change that anytime soon, maybe never. Part of the reason she’s not in any rush to get laid is due to the gland disorder she has had all her life. “I was born with hypopituitarism, which means my pituitary gland is not formed properly,” Lauren explained to VICE. “It doesn’t send the right hormonal messages to the other glands in the body, like the adrenaline gland or the ovaries.”

It allows women to share the motherhood experience from the stage of conception.

Getty images

More and more lesbian couples are having babies thanks to a super cool fertility treatment known as ‘shared motherhood’. What’s cool about it? Both women are involved in the process, as one’s eggs are used, and the other carries the child. I know, science is awesome.

New research carried out by The London Women’s Clinic, has revealed just how successful and efficient shared motherhood fertility treatment is proving to be. So here’s everything you need to know about the process. Plus, a success story from a couple who’ve become parents this way.

Pune: The parents of a 27-year-old man, who died of brain tumour two years ago, used their unmarried son’s cryopreserved semen extracted long before his death to have grandchildren. Fusing the semen with eggs of a matching donor, doctors created embryos and transferred them into a surrogate mother’s womb.

The woman, who incidentally is the man’s aunt, delivered healthy twin baby boys two days ago. Experts, however, have raised questions about the ethics behind the procedure. The man was diagnosed with brain tumour in 2013 while pursuing higher education in Germany.